ROCKFORD — Scientists, engineers and equipment-builders met on the factory floor Wednesday at Ingersoll Machine Tools to celebrate completion of machinery designed to help unveil the secrets of the sun.

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, DKIST for short, will be the world’s largest solar telescope. Construction of a housing facility for the telescope is underway on a mountaintop in Haleakal National Park in Maui, Hawaii, where the $300 million project is taking shape. The telescope was paid for by federal stimulus money; it is named for Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, who died in 2012.

Ingersoll, which employs 200 people and has a long history of building the world’s biggest and most precise machines, won $30 million to build a rotating base for DKIST and towers that resist vibrations that would ruin the types of data astronomers want to collect.

The equipment will support a lens that, at 4 meters, is five times larger than the largest lens used to observe the sun. Astronomers say it will be more like a microscope, allowing them to see in detail sunspots, magnetic fields, solar flares, coronas and other aspects of our solar neighbor.

The telescope base looks like something dropped from space instead of something to observe it. It resembles a white spoked wheel in three dimensions, the saucer-like machine a B-movie alien might use to land on Earth.

But this is top-notch scientific equipment that operates at tolerances — an engineering term for permissible design variances — that are half the width of a single human hair.

The size of the equipment is staggering. The base has a diameter of 52.5 feet, and motors can turn at one revolution a minute.

“It’s not fast, but it’s very accurate,” said Todd Triehoff, Ingersoll’s program manager.

The base and tower weigh 1.1 million pounds. When they are stacked, they will be 102 feet tall.